If we don’t know what love is until we look Prince in the eye and need him forever after, then maybe we’re his pinups and puppets and he’s translating for us an emotion we’ve kept so remote from our conscious minds that he has to go beneath his soul to dig it up. That is the solace of Als’s close encounters, his flash of a songbook—that it honors Prince’s commitment to being untranslatable, unsampleable.

Als has perfected the difficult art of being a discerning fan.

Who could be a better guide to Prince—to his polymorphous sexuality, his gleeful dismantling of the racial compartmentalization of American popular music, his seemingly effortless sprezzatura as a performer—than Hilton Als?

A triumph of loving erudition.

[A] world of difficult loves and lovers…What Prince had—and, by comparison, no one else has ever had—was style, by which I mean insolence, which offers its own kind of protection. He could show his ass (a high compliment). This was something Als learned to do “through language.” It was defiance through prowess.

[A] powerful ponderance on the power and influence of Prince, Pulitzer Prize winner Hilton Als ruminates on how his sexuality commingles with an obsession with the superstar. A unique braiding of memoir and essay…This is an outspoken, exacting work of observation and conclusion on Black brotherhood, racism, and celebrity fandom.

My Pinup is smart, sensual writing on a life of loving Prince and on the life of Prince himself. Hilton Als’s Prince is a clear, Black, queer vixen; an idol whose lyrics and performance provide instructions for living — he also serves as frame, filter, and soundtrack for Als’s navigations of romance and heartbreak. This paean, an art object reminiscent of a chapbook or novella, goes down like a tiny fruit tart made from a keenly demarcated recipe: complex, ambrosian, and brief. For a moment you want more, but you’ve already been given enough. Fire and elegance abound in these intimate pages.

In this slim and brilliant memoir, Als explores race, power, and desire through the lens of Prince. Styling the legendary musician in the image of his lovers and himself, Als explores injustice on multiple levels, from racist record labels to the world’s hostility to gay Black boys…These 48 meandering pages are difficult to describe, but trust us: My Pinup is a heady cocktail you won’t soon forget.

A tale of a brief encounter and long obsession with the late musical icon Prince. Undeniably engrossing.

Als is a fine, piercing observer and interpreter, a writer of lashing exactitude and veracity.

Als is one of the most consistently unpredictable and surprising essayists out there, an author who confounds our expectations virtually every time he writes: Magnificent.

A brief book, a religious tract, really. If there was church on the other side of it I’d go every Sunday.